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Corpus Linguistics and Ideology: a Study of Racist Discourse in the Odinic Rite Website

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Corpus Linguistics and Ideology: a Study of Racist Discourse in the Odinic Rite Website Corpus Linguistics and Ideology: A study of racist discourse in the Odinic Rite website Dax Thomas 2007 Table of Contents 1 Introduction 2 Background 2.1 Corpora in the study of ideology 2.2 Semantic prosody 2.3 Racism in written discourse 3 Corpus analysis 3.1 The main text 3.2 Current opinions of the text 3.3 Lexical Reiteration: frequency and keyness 3.3.1 Simple frequency count 3.3.2 Determining keywords 3.4 Collocation: computed collocations and concordance lines 3.4.1 Selection of keywords for analysis 3.4.2 Computed collocations 3.4.3 Concordance lines 3.4.3.1 odinic rite 3.4.3.2 our folk 3.4.3.3 aryan|aryans 3.4.3.4 christian|christians|christianity. 3.4.3.5 foreign 3.4.3.6 alien 3.4.4 Analysis summary and conclusion 4 Discussion 4.1 Disadvantages of CA in the study of ideology 4.2 Advantages of CA in the study of ideology 5 Conclusion 1 Introduction Recent years has seen an increase in the use of corpus analysis (CA) in the study of discourse. One interesting usage of CA is its application in the study of the ideology presented in written and spoken texts. From analysing political speech discourse (Flowerdew, 1997) to developing datasets for online information filtering (Greevy and Smeaton, 2004), CA has a variety of applications for the linguist interested in the study of ideology. The purpose of this paper is to examine the degree to which CA can assist in such research. The paper will first present a corpus analysis of an ideologically significant text - here, the website of the religious group known as the Odinic Rite. This analysis will demonstrate how CA can support judgements made about a group/text by showing how discourse on the Odinic Rite website seems to corroborate, to an extent, accusations of racism that have been made against the group in the past. The analysis will be necessarily brief, but will serve well to highlight many of the salient features of CA as they apply to this kind of study. Following this, the advantages and disadvantages of using CA to study ideology in discourse will be discussed in more detail. Before beginning the analysis though, it will be useful to take a brief look at 1 some of the previously conducted research in this area and discuss some of the important concepts used in this paper. 2 Background 2.1 Corpora in the study of ideology There have been many studies over the past several years that have used corpus analysis as a tool for the investigation of ideology in discourse. A few of the significant ones will be outlined here. Flowerdew (1997), for example, used a concordancer to examine a corpus of written and spoken discourse of the last British Hong Kong Governer, Chris Patten. He examined the semantic prosody of certain words in the text, like “economy” and “individual”, and determined that Patten was creating the “myth” that British colonial rule there had been positive. Xiaofei (2002) examined the underlying ideologies of American and Chinese media reporting on the Taiwan issue. Xiaofei analysed frequencies of verbal process words – like say, tell, warn – as well concordance lines to deduce that the media’s discursive 2 differences were rooted in the “different socio-logical contexts underlying the production of them” (12). Teubert (2000) examined a corpus of texts that were against the European Union. By comparing what he called “banner” and “stigma” keywords he could deduce the true positive sentiments of Eurosceptics towards the British government. Oprin (2005) conducted a study on the ideology of words relating to corruption. She used corpus analysis techniques to gather data and critical discourse analysis (CDA) to interpret the results in terms of ideological significance . 2.2 Semantic prosody An important element in this study is the concept of semantic prosody. Semantic prosody, sometimes referred to as “connotation” (Partington, 1998) or “discourse prosody” (Stubbs, 2001), is the positive or negative aspect that a word absorbs from its regular collocates. Since there is some debate as to the exact definition of semantic prosody (Whitsitt, 2005:283) it is necessary to comment here on how the concept is being used in this study. For the purpose of this study semantic prosody will be 3 defined as the positive or negative “charge” that is built up in a word based on its frequent proximity to other positive or negative words. It should also be noted that semantic prosody is used here in the “local”, not “global” sense. That is, the positive or negative charge conferred on a particular word by its collocates applies only within the specialised corpus and may not be extended to other texts or into general English usage. These words, in fact, often carry a distinctly different semantic prosody in a general corpus or in other specialized corpora – a point that some researchers, Flowerdew (1997) for example, sometimes fail to make explicitly clear. In the case of hidden ideology, it is precisely because of this difference between local and global prosodies that any significance can be derived from the study. 2.3 Racism in written discourse Of particular interest to the topic at hand are van Dijk’s discussions of racism in the European/British press (van Dijk, 1991, 2006). van Dijk approaches his investigations from a critical discourse analysis (CDA) point of view and while he does not seem to make use of corpus analysis techniques in his own research, some of his criteria for what constitutes racist discourse will be useful in establishing a framework for analysis 4 here. The overarching principle stressed throughout van Dijk’s work is that racist discourse tends to conform to the following basic strategy: Emphasize our good things, and their bad things De-emphasize our bad things, and their good things (2006:section 4) That is, in racist discourse the in-group, or “us” group, and its actions are evaluated positively while the out-group, or “them” group, and its actions are evaluated negatively. van Dijk finds that biased reporters often use the following discourse strategies: …presuppositions, implications, inferences, concealments, euphemisms, disclaiming denials, blaming the victim, negativization, and in general the combined strategy of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation. (1991:177) This paper will look primarily at self-/other-presentation – and how this relates to the concept of semantic prosody – as this is most readily discernable via CA. It will, though, also comment briefly on some of the other specific strategies when they become apparent. 5 3 Corpus analysis 3.1 The main text The text analysed in this paper consists of 114 individual web pages that, together, comprise the entire website of a religious group known as the Odinic Rite1. The Odinic Rite is one of several denominations belonging to a modern religion reconstructed from the pre-Christian Germanic religion of northern Europe. This religion is often referred to variously as Heathenism/Heathenry, Asatru or Odinism (see Appendix 1 for a very brief description of Heathenism and the Odinic Rite). The entire text corpus consists of 114 files totalling 113,749 words. All text from the website was included in the corpus with the exception of any text appearing in graphics or in special media, such as flash. Links to pages external to the site were also omitted. Thus, the corpus includes topics central to the group’s ideology but also information from the membership pages, contact information pages and online shop. 3.2 Current opinions of the text As this paper examines the ways in which corpus analysis can support or challenge judgments that are made about a text, the first task must be to clarify exactly what 1 The website for the Odinic Rite can be found at: http://www.odinic-rite.org/index2.html. 6 judgments are being made of the Odinic Rite. Krasskova (2005) in her book Exploring the Northern Tradition writes: At the other end of the spectrum, we have Folkish Heathenry. Perhaps no other “denomination” causes such controversy as this one does. When I first became Heathen in 1996, “Folkish” was used interchangeably with “racist,” denoting a person one step away from being a White Supremacist. Thankfully, over the years, this reactionary view has softened somewhat and we are now seeing spectrum of belief and practice within the Folkish community. At a basic level, Folkish Heathens believe that, in order to practice Heathenry, one must be either of English/Germanic/Scandinavian descent or acculturated to such a community. (p. 23) Her comments indicate some association of folkish Heathenism – a category of Heathenism to which the Odinic Rite belongs2 – with racial discrimination and the white supremacy movement, but also indicate a degree of debate surrounding the topic. While Krasskova does not mention the Odinic Rite specifically in this quote, a brief look at some dialogue from an online Heathen discussion forum can confirm that these sentiments do indeed apply to the organization. The following five quotes are from the non-denominational Heathen discussion board, Asatru Lore3: From what I’ve seen of them lately on the .net I think they’re a lot like the Hells Angles were, misunderstood. The HA’s have done a lot in the last few years to “clean up” their image. They do toy runs all the time and are involved in a bunch of other chairity [sic] work too. Same deal with the OR, they were pegged as “racist” because some of their members were that way but I think they’ve been trying to clean up their image and get back on track as more of a “Cult of Odin” group and less of a “kkk” style group.
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